an empty cage, if you kill the bird
by spatula spatula
Summary: endings, farewells, and dead-ends. (CJ/Toby)


**fandom:** west wing  
**title:** an empty cage, if you kill the bird  
**author:** tahlia  
**feedback:** dayglo_parker@yahoo.com  
**rating:** pg-13  
**category:** angst  
**pairing:** cj/toby  
**disclaimer:** c'est la property de aaron sorkin. desolee.  
**summary:** endings, farewells, and dead-ends.  
**notes:** to stephie, for being a tweaking-kind of beta. 

"he says, 'you're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird.'"  
-- tori amos, _crucify_

  
i 

The call comes at the worst possible time, and CJ's close enough to feel his cellphone vibrating through his coat pocket. He steps back, away from her, turns his head and speaks softly, but the nurse at the emergency desk is shouting loud enough and she hears the words as they cut through the awkward silence in her apartment. 

"Toby," she winces, when their car barely manages to get through the intersection. Her voice is full of anxiety and fear and guilt. 

The woman on the phone, she calls Andi his wife, and he doesn't correct her. She can't remember much else after, "she's gone into premature labor," because they're rushing out the door. 

He's driving too fast. He's gripping the steering wheel, drumming his fingers on it when they come to a stop, when the light won't turn green on his command, when the car in front of them insists on turning left. 

"Call the hospital," he demands. 

She can hear someone behind them, honking. "Toby-" 

"Call them." 

"We're five minutes away." 

He slams on the brakes at another stoplight, and she jerks forward a little. The dashboard is cold under her hand, because he's been too worried to turn the heat on. She's freezing, because she forgot to grab her coat. 

Firmly -- irrationally -- he says, "Just do it." 

_Calling won't stop Andi's labor_, she wants to tell him. The engine can't hear them; calling won't make them travel faster than traffic will allow. CJ turns, and starts to say these things, but she never makes it past, "Toby." 

She can see the guilt on his face, and she wonders whether she's wearing some, too. She can't possibly consider what they were thinking, what she was thinking, letting him into her apartment at that late hour. She reaches into the purse on the floor and fishes for her cell phone, ready to call. 

He's at her door, looking something not quite rumpled. His crisp white shirt is a little creased, but he is not unkempt, because Toby could never embody 'unkempt.' _I've been feeling out of sorts_, he starts to say, but he stops himself. They stare at each other, waiting for God knows what, and then he's kissing her and she suddenly remembers again what this feels like, so she lets him in. His hands on her hips, she's barely slammed the door behind them, further down down down, and she's hesitating; _maybe we shouldn't_, she says. He doesn't let her finish, though; moves closer, rubbing against her; and then his phone rings. Fate, maybe. 

Under the dashboard, it's dark and she can't feel her way through her purse to her phone. In the confusion, she tries to remember whether five months in the womb is enough, tries not to consider what pain might be on his face when they tell him that they weren't able to save them. That the best place for Andi to rest is at home. 

She can't even begin to imagine sitting in the lobby and trying to come up with a good explanation of why she's there with him. 

It's strange, because at first, she turns her head and the headlights coming straight at them don't register as out of the ordinary. So she turns to Toby, starts to dial the phone number, opens her mouth to warn him again, hears the longest, shrillest, loudest car horn, and... 

  
ii 

The man's going to be President. This much she knows about Jed Bartlet. Her only hope is that the American people see this, too. 

"I can't do this." 

Unlike before, he doesn't even pause. "Of course you can." 

"I," she twirls her french fry in the ketchup, absently, "I've never done something national." 

He takes a bite of his hamburger, slightly more exasperated this time around. "Maybe Leo didn't go into enough detail about how much of a one-man show I'm running here. I'm writing the press releases, CJ, _and_ I'm giving the briefings. I'm handling the press; I'm coordinating their interviews, denying their access, _trying_ to show them what's the truth and what's just Republican bullshit; not to mention, of course, doing what I was originally hired for." He wipes a little sauce from the corner of his mouth. "I'm offense, defense, and the guy who does the thing with the strategy." 

Chewing on her french fry, she asks, "What about that kid? Sam something or other." 

"Sam Seaborn?" 

"That's him. He could write the press releases and the speeches." 

His forehead creases a little. "I wouldn't, no, I wouldn't subject the press to that." 

There's someone pacing the hallway outside of Toby's office, someone whose name may or may not be Josh. He stops occasionally, gesturing in ways that only he understands, and always looking just a little bewildered. She tries to think of his name. Too many introductions today for her to possibly remember. 

"That speech to the Teacher's Union I heard," she says, focusing her attention again. "Didn't he write that? That wasn't bad." 

"You didn't see it before I made him rewrite it a couple of times." 

She leans back in her chair, smiling. "You're just a pain in the ass sometimes, you know that, right?" 

"I appreciate that," and he takes a swig of his beer. 

The man in the hallway slams his hand against the wall and she jumps, but Toby doesn't seem to notice. Or maybe he doesn't care. She suspects this is a possibility. 

"I can't do this," she repeats. 

"CJ-" 

"I'm not, I'm not comfortable on camera." 

He rubs his forehead. "I think you're just making things up now." 

She smiles a little before continuing. "You guys can't afford to bring anyone else on right now, and, don't get me wrong, I'm not doing this for free." 

He wades the paper from his hamburger up into a ball. "I hear Josh has a couple of bucks in the bank. Maybe he could take care of you until the budget catches up." 

From the hallway, the aforementioned Josh sticks his head in the doorway. "I heard that." Toby throws the ball of paper at the door, narrowly missing his head, and Josh disappears. She smiles a little. She's not sure whether she fits in. She doesn't say this. 

She tries to protest, but she catches an image of Josh beating something out in the air, and she loses her train of thought. "Does he always do that?" 

Toby sighs and she thinks this might be a common thing. "It's his attempt at remembering all the various meetings he's got tomorrow." 

"And he doesn't have an assistant to, you know, write that stuff done?" 

"Nah," he smirks into the bottle, "he bellows and they go running." 

She nods. "So can't he just do it himself?" He gives her a look, like she's suggesting the sky is purple, and she smiles a little. 

They're silent, and when she opens her mouth again, he's already two steps ahead of her. "Don't." He sighs, gearing up for the things they've already said three times in the last two days, and pre-empting it all. "You were great in New York, CJ. You were great in Maryland, you were great with Emily's List and you're going to be great here." 

For all his pessimism, he's putting his faith in her, and she knows this. Her eyes study the photos on the wall, where he is standing with people she doesn't recognize. Absently, she says, "I hated fund-raising. And I hated PR." 

He notices her eyes lingering on the photo, taken years ago at a fundraiser in Maryland, of himself and Andi and her. "Sometimes you've just got to take a risk," he says, echoing her words from years ago, when against her better judgement she took someone's meeting with a candidate's cranky husband because she recognized him from a bar. 

She knows he's right, but her plane ticket is burning a hole in her purse and she can't figure out how or why. All she knows is how much she just wants to run, run far away, run back to California. 

There's a memo on the table in his hotel room, something about a New Hampshire primary, and at four o'clock in the morning she writes him a note and includes her flight number. 

It feels good to run. 

  
iii 

Josh is covered in blood; hell, they're all still covered in blood. It's been almost twenty-four hours, and she and Sam are the only ones who have changed their clothes, because a nation doesn't need to see distraught staffers covered in blood. For that, they have CNN, replaying the live footage over and over ad nauseum. 

Josh is sitting quietly in the waiting room, picking at his fingernails where the blood dried after he pressed his hands to Toby's chest and tried to stop the endless bleeding. There's even still a little smudge near his temple, when he craddled his face in his hands and sobbed outside the ER doors. 

Trying not to cry, again. She's not sure when Andi arrived. 

She goes to the chapel down the hall, says a prayer; on the way back, she thinks she sees Sam in an empty room, writing. No one wants to acknowledge that fact which is looming before them, that someone's going to have to write it eventually. 

Skinheads, for Christ's sake. 

_Breathe in, breathe out_: if she could, she'd breathe for him, too. 

The surgeon pushes open the operating doors, _swoosh_, his scrubs covered in blood, Toby's blood. Pulls the mask from his face, searching for his patient's family, but doesn't he know they're all family? A hand grips hers, she's surprised; Andi. 

He opens his mouth and she can't believe the words that begin to come out. "I'm sorry..." 

  
iv 

The sounds of victory are muted on the television mounted on the wall. No one's quite sure how they all managed to stumble into this bar. 

He's scribbling furiously on a paper napkin, wet from the bottom of his latest round, when she joins him at the booth with two fresh glasses. "Please tell me that's not another-" 

He looks up sharply and she doesn't say the word. "It's not," a concession speech, another fucking concession speech. It's not enough that Bartlet had to get up in front of the nation and thank them for voting him out of office, now Toby is on some mission to say all the things he should have. 

She leans back and he twists the napkin around, and she can barely read his handwriting where it has started to run. It reads, _I'm sorry for_; and, _MS_; and, _lied to the American_; and, _sorry_, again. 

"Toby-" 

A wave of his hand. "He didn't say it." 

"He said it." 

"He didn't say it _enough_!" A few patrons turn, Sam turns, at the sound of his raised voice. Quieter, "He didn't say it enough." 

His head turns to the television, where Senator Thompson is taking the stage, shaking hands, smiling. "His entire platform was, 'I am not Jed Bartlet.' The American people elected this man because, guess what, he's not Jed Bartlet." Pause. "Well I'm certainly comforted knowing that while the President of United States was fighting to save welfare and Social Security and protecting free speech and trying to stop the nation's children from taking up arms against each other, _he_ was out reassuring people that he's not Jed Bartlet!" 

Thompson is hugging his wife and son on stage. Toby sighs, disgusted, and slips out of the booth. She watches him walk out, they all do, and she leaves him alone for a minute or so before dashing out after him. 

She's walking briskly, afraid he's already left, but she finds him standing, alone, in the parking lot, staring up at the sky. "He should be up there," he says when she's close enough. 

She agrees, "Yeah." 

He looks at her, and his expression is unreadable. "Sam said, he said Isobel called yesterday." She might even say he sounded hurt. 

The wind blows and she remembers it's November and she forgot her coat inside, so she shivers a little. "I was only humoring her." 

He opens his mouth and she thinks he's going to say something else, something about her selling out early or quitting before it was a done deal, or something, but he doesn't. He stares past her for a minute, and when she turns, she realizes that she can see the tip of the Washington Monument above the buildings. 

"I can't," but he doesn't finish. 

In the car, which neither of them should be driving (but old habits die hard; ooh, she thinks, bad word choice), he sighs. "I'm not going to stay here." 

She figured as much. 

"I might go home for a while," because to Toby, Washington has never been home. "Lock myself in an apartment and just...write." 

"About what?" 

He stares out the window, distracted. "The trials and tribulations of electing the right man even when he insists on doing the wrong things." 

She thinks it's been done already, that he'll never finish, that he'll emerge a year later with something he'll never be happy with, but she says nothing. She just drives. 

  
v 

_The one who resigned_, will always follow her job title. 

She was not without a new job when she left. She still kept the contacts she'd made when she worked for Emily's List, and this PR firm in Los Angeles had thrown one hell of a party. Where she was sinking Bartlet, her name was putting this firm on the map. Occasionally, she allowed her ego to glow. 

But still, she is CJ Cregg; you know, the one who used to work for Bartlet. 

Toby called a month ago, but she couldn't throw the fundraiser because, boy, wouldn't the Republicans have a field day with that? Too disgraced to speak for the President, but still worthy enough to take their money? Maybe it made sense there, to them, to that group to which she used to belong. 

She unlocks her door, tired, and he's sitting on the couch near the window, bathed in California sunlight. He looks uncomfortable. 

"You could come tonight," he begins without preamble. 

She leans against the kitchen counter, sighing, falling into old patterns, because they've already argued about this. "Or not." 

He pushes himself up from the couch and crosses towards her. "Come." 

"No." She can't face the people that she ran away from at a fundraiser for a man she has abandoned. She says this, a few times, over the phone, here in this apartment. 

We all wanted out; she can hear them: we all wanted out, but we stayed. 

It feels comfortable when he kisses her, finally, comfortable and familiar. He seems a little hesitant, though, the way he was hesitant the last time he came for her in California. And then she's upset, disgusted, thinking he's just doing this to bring her back in, and she pulls away, angry. Tries to, tries to move away, but the harder she fights the harder he holds on and she ends up kissing him again, deeper, more intense. 

She breaks down eventually, sobbing. 

  
vi 

"CJ," someone says breezily, but she sees the man in the lobby, waiting; vaguely familiar. She stops, and Anna thinks she's stopping for her. 

"You forgot your signature." 

She doesn't care. "He seems uncomfortable," she remarks with a smile. 

He can't be more than thirty-five, but already she can notice the way his hair, dark and curly, is thinning rapidly around his hairline. He turns a little, his face in profile, and she can't figure out where she might have seen him before. 

"Suzzie's one o'clock," Anna replies. "His wife's the candidate from Maryland." 

"The fundraiser we're organizing in July?" 

"Right." 

He sees her, through the glass that seperates the lobby from the offices, and she thinks he recognizes her because he seems surprised. He gives a little wave, but she does nothing. 

"I think I know him," she whispers, and she's not sure Anna hears. 

With a shake of her head, "I don't know, he scares me. Barged in here two hours ago and wondered why Suzzie couldn't up and meet with him right then and there. Kind of bolsterous about it, too, if you ask me." 

And then she remembers a bar, in New York, a year and half ago, where a man was comparing various candidate for city council to tragic Shakespearan heros. Trying to pick her up, she remembers, unsuccessfully. 

His name, she tries to remember, what was his name? Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Well, Shakespeare wrote plays -- tragic plays -- like Macbeth and Othello and Hamlet; Hamlet, Hamlet, _to be or not to be,_ to be, to be...Toby! Toby. 

"You want him?" 

She looks at Anna, startled. "Hmm?" 

"Suzzie's gonna be another half hour. You want to take him?" 

She thinks for a minute, before answering, "I'll let Suzzie handle 'em." She gathers the papers in her hands, shuffles them a little. "I'll be in my office." 

  


c'est tout. 


End file.
